Only Took 9 Months, But Warner Music Videos Finally Back On YouTube

from the how-big-were-the-losses? dept

You may recall last December that a spat over how much Google would pay Warner Music for hosting its videos (for free, mind you) created a situation whereby Warner Music videos were taken off the site (there are conflicting stories over who actually made the call to take the videos down). The end result of this was basically bad for everyone -- and even Warner's own musicians got pretty pissed off at Warner -- especially as they saw other musicians use YouTube to grow their audience. It only took nine months, but it looks like Warner Music and YouTube have finally worked out a deal to allow the videos back online. You have to wonder how much harm this did to Warner artists, and to the label itself. I'd argue that the failure to leverage a rather useful promotional platform to connect with audiences was likely to have been much greater than any "harm" done from file sharing.

Re: wow

No I didn't see any subliminal message in there. Unless you are talking about the subliminal message for the new DAN BULL album and single which is rocketing up the charts. It's an open letter to Lily Allen, and it's fucking hilarious.

Edgar Bronfman, what do you expect?

Warner Music is now owned by Edgar Bronfman Jr, the Seagram's heir and lucky sperm club member who previously lost a fortune on Universal Music. His operating method at Warner Music seems to be to keep everything locked up forever. There are so many entire catalogues that are unavailable anywhere on earth, except via MP3 blogs. (As an Australian, I'm particularly pissed off he got his hands on the Festival/Mushroom catalogue when Festival was finally sold off for scrap.)

But yeah, I can see his fear of having 96kbps MP3s of FM radio quality TV sound available on YouTube.